A brief reflection on combat in RPGs
Today is a holiday in the United States. Originally known as Decoration Day back when it was established in the 1800s, Memorial Day has come to serve as an annual reminder of the many thousands of American soldiers who have died in various wars throughout America’s history.
It’s sobering to think of the tens of thousands of people who have died in these conflicts, but that really just barely scratches the surface. At various times over the past century, rates of crippling injury among those soldiers who did not die in combat have ranged from 1 in 5 to nearly 1 in 2. And those are just the American soldiers. What about the soldiers from other nations? What about civilians?
This ties into one of those things that troubles me about the current state of RPGs.
Our genre is among those guilty of glorifying combat and overlooking its devastating effects. With rare exceptions (Fallout, Fire Emblem), RPGs offer up their combat reflexively and without reflection. They provide satisfying pyrotechnics and pop-up numbers. They also provide a constant acquisition of experience and loot to encourage the player not only to weather battles, but to actively seek them out. (RPG players call this grinding–in the real world, this would probably be called murder.)
Before we go any further, a disclaimer: I enjoy combat in games generally, and in RPGs specifically. There is a good reason why RPGs have combat. RPGs are the direct descendants of war games: it was all but inevitable that combat would begin as a central part (really, the central part) of the genre. When you consider that combat systems remain unusually rich soil for emergent possibilities relative to most gameplay alternatives, their enduring presence at the heart of computer role-playing games is easy to understand.
But there’s tone to consider as well, and that is where many RPGs simply fail. We commonly treat combat as something frivolous. Wounds never become infected; there is no scarring, no bleeding, no broken bones. Serious injuries have no lasting effects whatsoever, with recovery occurring instantaneously. Indeed, death itself is just one resurrection spell away from being undone (unless, of course, the plot demands otherwise). Characters that do a lot of killing eventually become all but invulnerable to injury even from direct hits with swords, guns or fireballs.
Battlestar Galactica provides us with a great object lesson in the difference between tone and mechanics. BSG featured a race of robots that were essentially immortal–upon death, their memories would wirelessly transmit to a resurrection facility and they would wake up in a new body. Mechanically, it’s not that different from the sort of constant resurrection we see in an RPG. But tonally, the way these two things are handled couldn’t be more different. Compare the pain and trauma of Cylon resurrection depicted on the show with the glassy-eyed indifference of characters resurrected in RPGs.
So frivolous is the combat in our RPGs that children have become the de riguer jRPG warrior-protagonists, nonchalantly slaughtering their way across continents in the search of whatever MacGuffins the game demands. Child soldiers, and we don’t even bat an eye. And why should we? The battles that litter these games are treated like inconsequential fluff.
Not all RPGs need to be dark, or realistic, or serious. RPGs can stay lightweight and silly–realism isn’t the same as fun, after all. But Memorial Day is an occasion to remember that real combat is not inconsequential; it is not fluff. Combat is terrifying, and can carry disastrous consequences for its participants. Those RPGs that do want to be taken seriously should consider treating their central mechanics with a little more gravity–that long sought-after “maturity” that we always claim to want.